I’m an expert in assessment, focusing on executives, but on the side I’ve spent a lot of time examining writers and creativity, so I know a fair amount about it. There are a number of “tests” of creativity, but they don’t work as standardized tools, which if you think about it is obvious!One of the simplest and most elegant is to tell someone “here’s a brick. Come up with as many things you can think of to do with it in the next thirty seconds.”There is a good real of research into creativity, and I will state flatly that creativity is hardwired into the human animal. Putting it to work or its best ability requires practice and raw material – neither of which this idiotic “test culture” supports.The standardized test movement has been attacked since the beginning. The SAT, for example, predicts one (1) thing: freshman year grades. Not graduation rates, not work success, not anything else.While I’m on my rant, liberal arts education builds critical thinking ability, especially compare & contrasting ability, conceptual thinking (making patterns out of complex information), and so forth. Contrary to the people like Scott Walker (himself a dropout) who want to turn every college and university into a trade school, liberal arts colleges serve a vital purpose — and if we want to talk about business, surveys of CEOs say they want more liberal arts graduates, not just people trained in some narrow technical skill.
I’m an expert in assessment, focusing on executives, but on the side I’ve spent a lot of time examining writers and creativity, so I know a fair amount about it. There are a number of “tests” of creativity, but they don’t work as standardized tools, which if you think about it is obvious!One of the simplest and most elegant is to tell someone “here’s a brick. Come up with as many things you can think of to do with it in the next thirty seconds.”There is a good real of research into creativity, and I will state flatly that creativity is hardwired into the human animal. Putting it to work or its best ability requires practice and raw material – neither of which this idiotic “test culture” supports.The standardized test movement has been attacked since the beginning. The SAT, for example, predicts one (1) thing: freshman year grades. Not graduation rates, not work success, not anything else.While I’m on my rant, liberal arts education builds critical thinking ability, especially compare & contrasting ability, conceptual thinking (making patterns out of complex information), and so forth. Contrary to the people like Scott Walker (himself a dropout) who want to turn every college and university into a trade school, liberal arts colleges serve a vital purpose — and if we want to talk about business, surveys of CEOs say they want more liberal arts graduates, not just people trained in some narrow technical skill.